For a second she looked nothing more than irritated, as though out on a picnic the weather had taken an unexpected turn. But then she bit her lip, and life became, even for Doris, a very threatening affair. Then that passed, too. She turned her back to me. I took my place on the cushion, and for the next five minutes neither of us said anything. She broke down at last and began to file her nails.
Maury came back shortly after. “I calmed her down,” he said. “I told them Paul was thinking of having a baby. Even the old man got some blood in his face.”
On that note I left.
The lights were out at home and I took it that everything had been cleared away and all were asleep. It was after midnight — I had come back from Brooklyn by way of the Village, where I had stopped off at several bars I used to habituate as a young man (a younger man) down from Cambridge. But the girls were the same and the boys were the same and so were the jazz musicians. I had enough beer to make me feel exactly as uncomfortable as the same amount had made me feel years ago, and then, whistling “Linda,” the hit song of 1947, I had taken the Eighth Avenue subway home, the end of an atavistic day. I had spent much of the day looking for some door that would lead me back into the simple life, but I had not found one. On the subway I had a vision of dopey Doris Horvitz in bed snuggling up to Maury; then I had a vision of myself, spinning further and further from my youth, and kissing as I went all the women who had ever entered Paul Herz’s life.
I sobered quickly at the entrance to the apartment. Though the lights were out not everyone was asleep. Gruber was in the living room showing himself slides, while in a posture of abandon — or rather in the posture of one abandoned — Mrs. Silberman was flung across a love seat. Her head lolled over one end, and one arm hung to the floor, dripping fingers. Over the further end, her hooked knees were weighted in place by two exhausted, earthbound legs. My father was rolled up on the sofa, his big jaw cradled on his knees. I stood in the doorway unnoticed as all the world flicked by. I watched them ride a gondola in Venice and mount the Acropolis in Greece; in the doorways of cathedrals in Paris, Chartres, and Milan, they all stood grinning. Beside the river Seine, my father took a woman’s hand.
Gruber, thinking himself unobserved, made various noises; some were necessary to the maintenance of his body, the rest were appreciative, recollective. I came into the room and whispered hello, though it would have taken a cannon to awaken the two sleepers.
“Sit down. Want to see Europe? Want to see how the other half lives?” he asked. “Ten countries in fifteen minutes. England, Scotland, Belgium, Holland, France, Andorra—”
I plunged down into the deepest chair I could find and groaned like a man twice my age. “I’ve been to Europe,” I said.
“Not in style, boy,” the doctor said. “Bet you’ve never seen little Andorra. Look at that, that’s me eating cannelloni in Sorrento.”
“I think I saw you eating cannelloni in Fiesole.”
“I ate it everywhere. Do you know the three smallest countries in Europe?”
“Andorra,” I said, “and two others.”
The wind leaving his sails came whistling by my ears. “Okay,” he said, “a wise guy like your old man,” and clicked off the machine. And then the room was dark, except for what light came up from the street below. We both burrowed into our chairs, witnesses only to our own thoughts and the deep sleep of the others.
“Look …” Dr. Gruber began.
Well, at least I would not have to bring it up myself; he too knew a mistake when he saw one.
“Yes?” I said, inviting him not to be shy.
“Look, who’s this E. E. Cunningham? What’s he trying to do, put something over on the public?”
“What? Who?”
“E. E. Cunningham. He writes poems. Does he think he’s going to put something over on the public?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“What is that stuff supposed to be anyway? A poem?”
I had been willing to raise my mind out of grogginess for a discussion of the crisis in my home, but I could not manage to drag it higher, to manage Gruberian literary criticism. I remembered that when he had read Hemingway in Life, it had been me to whom he had come directly with his complaint: “What is this guy supposed to be, great?” Now, I supposed, Cummings had been quoted in Time, or, who knows, the ADA Journal. Culture is everywhere.
“I don’t think the guy’s going to put anything over on anybody. People,” Gruber said, “have got a lot of native sense.”
At that moment I couldn’t think of anybody I knew who had a drop, but I only nodded my head. I said, “Dr. Gruber, I hate to change the subject, but don’t you think she drinks a good deal?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. S.”
“Fay? She’s a good-time Charley! She’s a terrific gal!”
“But she drinks a lot. Is my father drunk?”
“He had the time of his life — he’s a new man. Christ, he was a melancholy specimen. Now he’s topnotch.”
“Do you think he’s going to be happy, Doc?”
“What’s the matter with you, boy? He is happy. Look at him now — he’s smiling, for God’s sake, in his sleep. We had the time of our lives.” He suddenly leaped up. “Here,” he said, “I want you to see some happy faces.”
He flipped on the machine. “Switzerland! Just before we left. Skating in November, can you imagine?”
Alas, we were on a lake, cupped between two white peaks. Dr. Gruber was holding up Mrs. Silberman under the arms; the two of them were laughing, their heads thrown back, their mouths open. Over at the left-hand edge of the picture, stood my father, wearing a feathered Alpine hat and his gray pin-striped suit. Like the others, he was on skates, but his attention didn’t seem to be on the sport.
“Look at her ankles!” Dr. Gruber said, but I was looking at those two eyes that were the color of my own. They were directed toward the distant mountains, fastened forever on the impossible.
In the morning, of course, neither Millie nor I, nor either of the lovers, commented on the fact that once again at our breakfast table sat three.
2
Sarah Vaughan awakened Martha Reganhart. She twisted around until she had plugged “Tenderly” out of her ears with her sheet and pillow — but then Markie was in bed beside her.
“Where’s the turkey?”
“Honey, it’s too early. Go color, go back to bed—”
“Sissy’s playing records.”
“Go tell Sissy to turn them off.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Tell Cynthia to. Markie baby, Mother’s beat. Will you just give her five more minutes? Tell Cynthia to tell Sissy to turn down the volume.”
“What?”
“The volume. Tell her …” She caught sight of the whole family’s dirty laundry heaped up in a corner of the gray room, and she almost went under. “Tell her to turn down the phonograph.” A bleary eye fell on the electric clock. “It’s seven, honey — it’s a holiday. Tell Cynthia—”
“Cynthia’s talking on the phone.”
“What phone?”
“She called the weather.”
“Oh Christ, Mark, tell your sister to hang up! Tell Sissy to lower the phonograph. Oh baby, your pants are wet—”
“It’s going to be clouds all day,” Mark said.
“Markie—”
You took my lips,